Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah — Volume 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 552 pages of information about Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah — Volume 1.

Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah — Volume 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 552 pages of information about Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah — Volume 1.

[FN#1] Festival.  It lasts the three first days of Shawwal, the month immediately following Ramazan, and therefore, among Moslems, corresponds with our Paschal holidays, which succeed Lent.  It is called the “Lesser Festival,” the “Greater” being in Zu’l Hijjah, the pilgrimage-month. [FN#2] In Chap.  V. of this Volume, I have mentioned this cemetery as Burckhardt’s last resting-place. [FN#3] You are bound also to meet even your enemies in the most friendly way-for which mortification you afterwards hate them more cordially than before. [FN#4] Persian. [FN#5] With due deference to the many of a different opinion, I believe “Kahirah” (corrupted through the Italian into Cairo) to mean, not the “victorious,” but the “City of Kahir,” or Mars the Planet.  It was so called because, as Richardson has informed the world, it was founded in A.D. 968 by one Jauhar, a Dalmatian renegade before mentioned, when the warlike planet was in the ascendant. [FN#6] “There were no weeping women; no neighhours came in to sit down in the ashes, as they might have done had the soldier died at home; there was no Nubian dance for the dead, no Egyptian song of the women lauding the memory of the deceased, and beseeching him to tell why he had left them alone in the world to weep."-(Letter from Widdin, March 25, 1854, describing a Turkish soldier’s funeral.) [FN#7] Captain Haines wisely introduced the custom into Aden.  I wonder that it is not made universal in the cities of India, where so much iniquity is perpetrated under the shadow of night. [FN#8] The reason being that respectable Europeans, and the passengers by the Overland Mail, live and lodge in this quarter. [FN#9] “Our lord,” i.e.  H.H. the Pasha.  “Kikh” is an interjection noting disapproval, or disgust.-"Fie!” or “Ugh!” [FN#10] Shortly after the Ramazan of 1853, the Consul, I am told, obtained an order that British subjects should be sent directly from the police office, at all hours of the night, to the Consulate.  This was a most sensible measure. [FN#11] Most Eastern nations, owing to their fine ear for sounds, are quick at picking up languages; but the Armenian is here, what the Russian is in the West, the facile princeps of conversational linguists.  I have frequently heard them speak with the purest accent, and admirable phraseology, besides their mother tongue, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani, nor do they evince less aptitude for acquiring the Occidental languages. [FN#12] It has been too frequently treated of, to leave room for a fresh description.  Though pretty and picturesque, it is open to the reproach of Moslem dressing, namely, that the in-door toilette admits of a display of bust, and is generally so scanty and flimsy that it is unfit to meet the eye of a stranger.  This, probably the effect of secluding women, has now become a cause for concealing them. [FN#13] He was from the banks of the Nile, as his cognomen, al-Basyuni proves, but his family, I was told, had been settled for three or four generations at Meccah. [FN#14]

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Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah — Volume 1 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.